Hardwarekorteissa

Hardwarekorteissa is a Finnish open‑source hardware initiative that was launched in 2015 by a group of hobbyist engineers and university researchers from Tampere. The project’s primary goal is to develop affordable, modular electronic components that can be easily assembled by makers, educators, and students. The flagship product of the initiative is the KorttiX add‑on board, a compact microprocessor module that supports a range of I/O interfaces including GPIO, SPI, UART and PWM. KorttiX is designed to be compatible with the popular Arduino ecosystem while providing advanced features such as real‑time kernel support and low‑power sleep modes.

Hardwarekorteissa operates under the GNU GPL license and hosts its hardware schematics and firmware repositories on GitHub. The community relies on a combination of online forums, regional hackathons, and collaborative design contests to expand its product line. In addition to hardware, the project also develops accompanying software libraries that provide device drivers and real‑time operating system (RTOS) bindings, making it easier for developers to integrate KorttiX modules into larger systems.

The initiative has attracted funding from several EU research programmes, including Horizon 2020, and has formed partnerships with local universities for research and curriculum development. Since its inception, Hardwarekorteissa has sold over 5,000 modules worldwide and has been cited in academic publications related to embedded systems education. The project continues to evolve through community contributions, with planned releases that aim to extend support to wireless communication stacks and machine‑learning inference on edge devices.